The Church is an Experience | Room For More | Pastor Joe Coffey

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Acts two one through 41. When the day of Pentecost arrived, they were all together in one place, and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like a mighty rushing wind. And it filled the entire house where they were sitting, and divided tongues as a fire appeared to them, and rested on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and began to speak in other tongues, as the spirit gave them utterance.

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Now there were dwelling in Jerusalem Jews, devout men from every nation under heaven. And at this sound the multitude came together, and they were bewildered, because each one was hearing them speak in his own language. And they were amazed and astonished, saying, are not all these who are speaking Galileans? And how is it that we hear each of us in his own native language?

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Parthians and Medes and and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and parts of Libya belonging to Cyrene, and visitors from Rome, both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians. We hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God. And all were amazed and perplexed, saying to one another. What does this mean?

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But others mocking said, they are filled with new wine. But Peter, standing with the 11, lifted up his voice and addressed them, Men of Judea and all who dwell in Jerusalem, let this be known to you, and give ear to my words. For these people are not drunk as you suppose, since it is only the third hour of the day.

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But this is what was uttered through the prophet Joel, and in the last days it shall be. God declares, that I will pour out my spirit on all flesh, and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions, and your old men shall dream dreams, even on my male servant and female servants. In those days I will pour out my spirit, and they shall prophesy, and I will show wonders in the heavens above, and signs on the earth below.

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Blood and fire, and vapor of smoke. The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood. Before the day of the Lord comes the great and magnificent day. And it shall come to pass that everyone who calls upon the name of the Lord shall be saved. This Jesus God raised up. And of that we are all witnesses, being therefore exalted at the right hand of God, and having received from the father the promise of the Holy Spirit, he has poured out this that you yourself are seeing and hearing.

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For David did not ascend into the heavens, but he himself says, the Lord said to my Lord, sit at my right hand until I make your enemies your footstool. Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made him both Lord and Christ, this Jesus whom you crucified. Now when they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter and the rest of the apostles, brothers, what shall we do?

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And Peter said to them, repent and be baptized, every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ, for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. For the promise is for you and for your children, and for all those who are far off. Everyone whom the Lord our God calls to himself, and with many other words, he bore witness and continued to exhort them, saying, save yourselves from this crooked generation.

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So those who received his word were baptized, and they were added. That day about 3000 souls.

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Hey, everybody, welcome to see. My name is Joe. I'm one of the pastors here, and I'm glad you've come. If you're seeing me on the screen right now, it's because I am preaching out in the tent. But I'm glad you're here. All right. This is the second week of our ten week series in the Book of Acts, and the Book of Acts is a sequel to the Gospel of Luke, and I think this is going to be a great series.

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I think we're going to learn a lot together. Christianity began with a ragtag group of uneducated people with no money and no political power, and within 2 or 3 generations that had swept across the Roman Empire and became the dominant influence in the known world. There's a historian named Kenneth Scott LaTourette. He was actually used to be a professor at Yale University.

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This is what he wrote. The more one examines the various factors which seem to account for the extraordinary victory of Christianity, the more one is driven to search for a cause underlying them all. It is clear at the very beginning of Christianity, there must have occurred of vast release of energy, virtually unequaled in history. Without it, the future course of the religion is inexplicable.

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That vast release of energy happened in acts chapter two. And that's what we're going to look at today. Acts chapter two tells the story of how it starts out with 120 people. And I get that number from chapter one, and it's the total number of followers of Jesus in the entire world. 120 people in a single space. And they're waiting for the fulfillment of a promise.

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Jesus had been crucified, resurrected, had appeared multiple times over the course of 40 days, and right before he ascended into heaven, he gave them a promise that he would send the Holy Spirit, and with the Holy Spirit would come power. And then it happened, and it was wild. I don't know if you were listening to those first few verses.

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There's a mighty rushing wind. There are flames of fire on people's heads. People are speaking in languages that they didn't know. Peter stands up and he gives a pretty pointed sermon. People are cut to the heart. They repent. And 3000 people are baptized that day and the church explodes into existence. I don't think anybody walked away from that thinking, hey, that was a pretty good service.

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Enjoy the music. Yeah. The guy, the guy who spoke, he was all right. You know, their minds were blown. I remember going to the Dead Sea when I was in the Holy Land and the Dead Sea. If you've never been there, it's so concentrated with salt that you float in a way that you don't float anywhere else. It's like you could.

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You can float like you're sitting in a chair. You're this much out of the water. It's just an experience you have to have. And I was in the locker room changing afterwards. And it was people from everywhere, from every nation there. And I'll send I hear a guy go, hey, does anybody here speak English? And I was like, I do.

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And he walked over to me and he just went, was that awesome or what? That's all he wanted to say. I think that's the way it must have felt with these people who had went through that. Now, this is what I want you to get, that when the church came into existence, it wasn't a building or something you went to.

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It wasn't even a service that you would enjoy or consume. It was a gathering of people who had encountered the Holy Spirit because of the resurrection of Jesus. It was a group of people experiencing something no human being had ever experienced before. And that experience form my three points that I want to cover. What happened in the early church?

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What happens? It's supposed to happen in church. Is you're supposed to experience the presence of God, the power of the gospel and the beginning of the miracle, the presence of God, the power of the gospel, and the beginning of a miracle. First, the presence of God starts out verse one, when the day of Pentecost arrived. Now I want you to notice.

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It doesn't say that on the day that would one day be called Pentecost. It says, when the day of Pentecost there was already a feast happening. The Jews for hundreds of years had been celebrating what they called Pentecost. Pentecost. The word penta men's 50 days after the Passover. If you remember, Jesus was crucified over the Passover weekend. In fact, it was the the Passover meal where Jesus took bread and he broke it.

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And he said, this is my body. And he took a cup and he said, this is my blood poured out for you. Passover was when the Jews celebrated, when God had redeemed them from Egypt by the blood of a lamb. And Jesus took that and showed them that even what was happening thousands of years before was all about him, because he was the Lamb of God.

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I just want you to see that the entire story of the Bible is one story. So 50 days after Passover, they have Pentecost, and Pentecost is a celebration of the harvest. So it's a celebration of God making the earth just explode with life. And that's what happens in the early church. It goes on and it says they were all together in one place.

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That's the 120 people that were in chapter one. And then it says, and suddenly there came from heaven a sound like mighty rushing wind. And it filled the entire house where they were sitting, and divided tongues as of fire, appeared to them and rested on each one of them, and they were all filled with the Holy Spirit. Okay, this was not planned.

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All of a sudden God shows up and what happens is a radically different experience of the presence of God. This is something that had never happened before in a couple of different ways. One, it happened to everyone, all 120 people that didn't just happen to the leaders, to Peter, James and John. It wasn't like in the Old Testament where Moses goes up on Mount Sinai and is in the presence of God, then comes down and tells the people about it.

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Every one of them experienced the rushing, powerful wind. Every one of them had flames of fire over there. Every one of them was filled with the Holy Spirit. And that fire just sticks with me. Because in Exodus chapter three, Moses, in his first encounter with the presence of God, is out in the wilderness and something catches his eye.

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It's a bush that is on fire but is not consumed. So Moses walks over and when he gets close to the bush, then he hears the voice of God that says, take off your sandals, for you are on holy ground. And then God begins to talk to Moses, right? Wouldn't it be amazing to see that bush, like if I knew where it was right now?

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And I said, I can take you to the burning bush where God's presence is in a bush, like a normal bush. And the only thing that makes that bush different is that the very presence of God is in it, and it is not consumed. Would you want to go? That's the church. If you have Jesus Christ as your Savior and your Lord means the Holy Spirit is within you, which means you are unlike any other person and that you are like them.

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But you have the Spirit of God, the fire of God in you. You are like a bush on fire that is not consumed. I do a podcast called Faith stories, and I talk to people about their first kind of encounter when they really felt God radically changed the life. What I'm looking for is that time when the fire came into them, when the presence of God came into them.

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There's an every time you come into this place, it's like walking to the field filled with burning bushes. That's why it's not the same when you watch online. Like watching a line is great if you're on vacation, but you know, it's there's something different to it. You're missing something. And it's not just that you're you're missing the singing is of you're missing sitting with the people who are all have the presence of God.

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Because the first thing that made the experience different than anything that human beings had ever experienced before is that the presence of God came into them and filled them, not just the place, and filled them. That's the first thing. The second thing is they they experienced the power of the gospel, the power of the gospel. So they come in and they got 120 people.

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And then this power comes in the rushing wind, the flames of fire. And then it gets really weird with the speaking in languages that they didn't know. Right. And people get kind of stuck on the the tongues thing. And I'm just going to mention a couple of things about it and then get off it. The first thing is this what happened was the day of Pentecost.

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There were people from every tribe and nation, and actually Luke mentions about 15 different people groups, different languages. So what happens when the people, when the these disciples begin to speak in languages they don't know? It's not so that they can have some kind of spiritual experience themselves or have a spiritual high. It's so the people around them can hear the gospel in a way that they can understand and believe.

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Right? And that's what happens, because what it says in verse 11 is this. It says in all we're amazed. No, wait. Both Jews and proselytes, Cretans and Arabians, we hear them telling in our own tongues the mighty works of God and the mighty work of God that they were talking about was the death and resurrection of Jesus, what we call the gospel.

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And this is the way Peter says it. He says, Men of Israel hear these words Jesus of Nazareth, man attested to you by God with mighty works and wonders and signs that God did through him in your midst. As you yourselves know this Jesus delivered up according to the definite plan and for knowledge of God you crucified and killed by the hands of lawless men.

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Then he says this Jesus God raised up. And of that we are all witnesses. Let all the house of Israel therefore know for certain that God has made them both Lord and Christ. This Jesus whom you crucified. That's that's pretty harsh. Like he's not talking to the Roman soldiers who actually put the nails in Jesus hands. He's talking to normal people, and he's saying, you need to know that it's your sin that put the Son of God on the cross.

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And when he says that, it says this, that they heard this, they were cut to the heart and said to Peter, brothers, what shall we do? And Peter said, repent and be baptized, every one of you, right? This thing I want you to get. The gospel literally means good news. That's what it means. Good news. The power of good news is always connected to how bad things are before you get the news.

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Always the power of good news. Always connected how bad things are before you get the good news. If I go see my doctor and the doctor says, Joe, I know you feel like you're doing okay. I just want you to know you have a condition that, if left unchecked, is terminal and you're going to die. And I would say, well, okay, what can I do?

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And then the doctor says, we have a cure. It's 100% effective. That would be great news. You feel that you can go to churches all over this area, walk in, and you will never hear that you have a condition in your soul that is absolutely terminal. And if you do not get cured, you will go to hell. And if you don't hear that in that church, it means there's no power there, because there can be no good news there.

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There's no gospel there. In fact, this listen to this. If you have never, never been cut to the heart where you realize that no matter how you feel about yourself, that your soul is terminal, that your sin put Jesus on the cross and you have not cried out, at least inside, what do I need to do? And repented and been baptized?

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And you have not experienced the power of the gospel? Not like this. Not the power that was unleashed in acts chapter two that ended up changing the world, not the power that was unleashed that human beings had never experienced before in the history of the world. Right? The first thing that people experience in the church is the presence of God.

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Second thing is the power of the gospel. And finally, the beginning, the the beginning of the secret of changing everything. All right. So it starts with 120 people in a room, right? And they begin there waiting for the promise to be fulfilled. And then the Holy Spirit comes and there's a mighty rushing wind. There's flames of fire. There's.

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They speak in languages that they don't know. And things begin to happen because they when they speak in languages that they don't know, there's this huge crowd around because it's a festival and a feast, and there are people from all over and he list them out and let me just list them again. It says, how is it that we hear each in his own native language, Parthians and Medes, Elamites and residents of Mesopotamia, Judea, Cappadocia, Pontus, Asia, Phrygia, Pamphylia, Egypt, parts of Libya, Cyrene, visitors from Rome, Jews, proselytes, Cretans, Arabians, they all begin to hear the gospel in their language and they are cut to the heart.

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They repent, they all get baptized. And by the end of chapter two, the 120 followers of Jesus has turned to over 3000 people in a melting pot from every nation around. Right? It's exact opposite of what happens in Genesis chapter 11. In Genesis chapter 11, it's the story of the Tower of Babel and what happens to the Tower of Babel.

Genesis 11 · chapter mention Genesis 11 · chapter mention

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People are rebelling against God, and the end result is that their languages are confused. They can't understand each other, and so they break up into tribes and move away from each other. And it's the beginning of the fracture of our world. Acts chapter two reverses. That brings people together under one message. They understand each other and they understand the message.

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And people from every tongue and tribe and people and nation begin to worship together. It's the the restoration of all things. It's the portent to the kingdom of God. Years and years ago, I was at a Christmas party. I was part of a board, and we had this Christmas party. We didn't know each other that well in the host after dinner.

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Said, hey, I have a question everybody can answer. What's the best Christmas gift you ever received? And so people were thinking. And then probably the oldest guy in the room is a guy named Pete Kessler, and he was probably in his 80s. And Pete said, I'll go. And this is the story that Pete told. He said he was about 19 years old.

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It was the end of World War Two, and he had just gotten in the war. The war was just ending. It was 1945, and he was assigned to southern China to keep the Chinese army from flooding into Japan. And he said that he was stationed there, and it was Christmas Eve. He had just become a Christian not long before, and all of his fellow soldiers were kind of making Mary, and he just didn't feel a part of that.

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And he wanted to do something different. So he walked outside the barracks and there were rickshaws lined up, and he just went from one rickshaw to the next rickshaw, saying one word church. Church, church, church. And finally one rickshaw driver went church. And so Pete got in. And then Pete said that rickshaw driver drove him for an hour to the bowels of Beijing, came upon this big wall with a single door in the wall, pointed at it, and said, Church and Pete got out, opened the door, walked into a big courtyard, and over in a corner of about 100 Chinese people with candles.

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And he said they were singing, and he recognized the tune because they were singing Silent Night, Holy Night. And Pete said he walked over and he worshiped with them for an hour, and he said he felt more at home with them than he did with his fellow soldiers back in the barracks. 60 years later, he would tell a group of us, that was the best Christmas present I ever had.

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You know why? Because it was the beginning of the miracle. What he was experiencing was just the taste of the restoration of all things. When people from every tongue and tribe and people and nation will gather together, it was a portent to the kingdom of God. Listen, every time you come to this place, you're not just coming to a service or to a building.

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You're coming to participate with a group of people who have been filled with the Holy Spirit because of the resurrection of Jesus Christ. You are experiencing the presence of God in a way that no human being ever experienced it before. Acts chapter two. You're experiencing the power of the gospel. That is such great news because our souls were so broken and Jesus came to heal us.

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And you come to experience the beginning of the miracle of the restoration of all things, that the kingdom of God comes with power because Jesus Christ came for us. Did you pray with me? Father in heaven, thank you that the whole Bible just fits together so much that, Passover and Pentecost and the crucifixion and resurrection and then this filling of people with the Holy Spirit.

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I pray for all of us here that we will not just experience the church as a as a service that we consume, but that we will come here expecting you to show up, that we experience your presence the way you intend for us to experience your presence, that we will realize that we are on holy ground because we are surrounded by people who are like bushes that are on fire and not consumed.

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I pray that you would help us to understand the power of the gospel, and I pray that you will also remind us every time we come, that it's the beginning of the miracle that the Kingdom of God has come, and one day you will restore all things. We pray this in Jesus name. Amen.